Month: June 2015

A Week Before Midterms, GOP Devastated By The Fact That The Affordable Care Act’s Working (October 27, 2014)

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Though the paper of record does its frustrating best to bury the implications in an innocuous headline, this week The New York Times published an assortment of answers to the question, “Is the Affordable Care Act Working?” Leveraging seven specific subqueries, a variety of writers evaluate the data one year from the official rollout of Obamacare, assessing the legislation’s early efficacy.

If readers are able to get past the meaningless non-reporting of the piece’s opening summary, there is plenty of good news to be found:

“After a year fully in place, the Affordable Care Act has largely succeeded in delivering on President Obama’s main promises, an analysis by a team of reporters and data researchers shows. But it has also fallen short in some ways and given rise to a powerful conservative backlash.”

Let’s take a step back from the inexplicably conflicted tone of this summation and jump right into question one, asked and answered by writer Margot Sanger-Katz. The legislation’s first and most important goal was deceptively simple: lower the number of the hardworking uninsured, who live just one accident or illness away from financial ruin. So, “Has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced?”

The answer just 12 months later is a resounding yes. Per Sanger-Katz, “The number of Americans without health insurance has been reduced by about 25 percent this year — or eight million to 11 million people.” The detailed response offers a number of facts, figures and charts that elaborate on the myriad ways in which formerly shutout people are now able to avail themselves of at least basic coverage – the extension of benefits to young adults attached to parental policies, expansion of Medicaid (despite 23 red states rejecting the aid for purely shameful, partisan reasons), etc.

Honestly, were the analysis to stop there, it would be material enough for supportive Democratic candidates to tout in the last few days of midterm campaigning. At the same time, the unbendable numbers should leave obstinate Republicans who did everything possible to stop Obamacare’s implementation with a lot of ‘splaining to do. We know by now, of course, that neither of these scenarios will occur. I propose a new slogan for the Affordable Care Act: Obamacare -The Most Successful Legislation in Recorded History for Which No One Wants Credit.

In the interest of brevity, I am going to skip a few other answered questions in the Times piece that point to significant patient benefits – expanded coverage at mostly affordable costs, and an end to the pre-existing conditions nightmare. Right about now you may be asking yourself: This is the 21st Century and corporations are people! How have the lowly insurers fared in this great sea change? I give you the piece’s fifth question and answer:

“Has the health care industry been helped or hurt by the law? Wall Street Analysts See Financial Boon Across the Health Care Spectrum.”

How is this possible given the immense howling we heard from the right about the threats to private sector and business growth? Writer Reed Abelson observes, “From the beginning, opponents of the Affordable Care Act have warned that it represented a ‘government takeover’ of the health care system that would lead to crippling regulations on both for-profit companies and nonprofit players. But to the contrary, Wall Street analysts and health care experts say, the industry appears to be largely flourishing, in part because of the additional business the law created.”

In another words, exactly NONE of the oft-shouted objections to reforming America’s broken health care system came to fruition. Not a one. Everyone wins except for the low-income uninsured, who remain so thanks to the cruelty of their Republican governors. This should be a huge asset to struggling Democratic candidates and a kick in the teeth to overconfident Repubs. But it won’t be. And why? Because somewhere along the way, almost every single legislator as well as the mass media decided to buy into the GOP’s narrative. Obamacare is a very bad thing.

Even the “liberal rag” New York Times offers no assistance in righting this ideological injustice. How to else to explain the throwaway last sentence of the article’s opening summary: “[Obamacare] has also fallen short in some ways and given rise to a powerful conservative backlash.” Um, so what? Show me a piece of perfect legislation and I’ll show you a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Also, here’s a short list of other forces that have given rise to “powerful conservative backlash:” a woman’s right to make family planning choices, the normal functioning of government and the living and breathing of one Barack Obama.

The numbers are out. Will they make a dent in the collective ACA dithering, hair-splitting and denial in time to make a difference at the polls?

New York City’s Municipal ID Program Offers Model For Circumventing Immigration Inertia (October 22, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

immigration-law-picture

I have a close friend who’s more like a little sister. We both live and work in Chicago, the third most populous city in the United States. In the Windy City, home to almost three million people, the shifting demographics of the nation have already become a new normal. As of the 2010 Census, just 45 percent of Chicago’s residents self-identify as exclusively Caucasian. Of the remaining ethnic categories, African Americans, and those of Hispanic or Latino descent, represent the largest groups.

I highlight these numbers in order to drive home the resigned frustration associated with incidents like the following. My friend, a beautiful woman of mixed racial heritage (half Caucasian, half Haitian Creole), works in a customer-facing position with a large banking chain. She’s also possessed of far more patience than most, which I suppose is a major driver of her professional success. She recounted the following dialogue between herself and a client earlier this week:

Friend (to Customer): Wow. There are a lot of people in our system with the same name as you.

Customer: Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t know this since you’re not an American, but…

Friend: How am I not American?

Customer: Because you’re of Latin descent.

Friend: I’m not. But I’m still confused as to why I wouldn’t be American.

Chicago has many flaws as an urban community, but on the whole, its citizenry skews liberal. It is not a Tea Party stronghold and for the most part, the city eludes the sort of redneck militia reputation that is often pinned on the Midwest. Yet the encounter described above is far from rare. My pal considered herself lucky that the “gentleman” assumed her immigration (of course she was born locally) is legal. This is what counts for a good encounter with the presumptive, threatened white male.

This trying anecdote was front in center in my thoughts as I read “Membership’s Perks, for Immigrants, Too” from The New York Times Editorial Board this week. Though the piece reports on The Big Apple’s introduction of a citywide identity card that “will tell everybody that its owner is a bona fide New Yorker,” the sting of truth is felt in the short opinion’s last paragraph:

“The longer it takes for Congress to act on immigration reform, the more it will fall to cities and towns to keep America’s welcoming spirit alive. Municipal IDs are signs of confidence in the benefits of integration — the belief that when strangers rub shoulders, when outsiders are welcomed and absorbed, the community flourishes.”

There’s an unwritten rule that neither side of the political aisle wants to discuss real issues in the run-up to an election. And Congress is certainly not to going to make any moves. With the midterms less than two weeks away, it seems Ebola finger pointing and Obama repudiation is as deep as any candidate is going to get. It was midsummer, during the height of the Central American child migrant border surge, that we last had any serious discussion about our broken immigration system.

So let’s be grateful to New York City for keeping this mess in the headlines, for trying to find real ways to work around the inertia on Capitol Hill to bring people together, even if it takes a little self-interested carrot dangling. That’s the American way! Per the editorial:

“The city has designed the card to include side benefits, like free admission or discounts at 33 cultural institutions, including the Bronx Zoo, Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Those perks are meant to entice nonimmigrant New Yorkers to sign up, too.”

It won’t be much longer at all until Chicago’s bank customers, such as the one who plagued my friend, will be forced to keep their ignorant observations to themselves. The judgment of one’s Americanness based on skin color is already antiquated, and with a little more time, social norms will act as a further barrier. The presumptive, threatened white male’s verbal aggression is in the death throes in the Second City. The sensation is palpable – and one of the reasons we can share these stories with something approaching pity and humor.

But for the millions of undocumented workers forced to remain on the fringes in cities and towns across the country, our nation’s failure to act is no laughing matter. Let’s not wait until after the midterms to renew calls to action. It’s well beyond time to overhaul a system that benefits from underpaid labor while sneering at the hardworking people who provide it. And if Congress won’t budge, I hope my city and many others will consider following New York’s lead.

Who’s Responsible For The Media’s Ebola Malpractice? We Are (October 18, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Ebola-story

The Ebola crisis in West Africa is a deadly serious threat. But for many reasonable, concerned Americans it’s become difficult to separate the reality of the devastation occurring on that continent, from the overblown media and political hysteria that’s dominating our national news cycle. Can any person of intelligence stay engaged when, as our own Justin Baragona reported this week, Keith Ablow, a Fox News Contributor Claims Obama Wants Ebola To Spread In US Because He Hates America?

It’s possible to feel empathy for the two Dallas, Texas healthcare workers who’ve been diagnosed with the disease after treating an infected patient, without extrapolating that we’re on the verge of a pandemic. And to take the argument a step further (I’m looking at you Fox News and Republican lawmakers), it’s a cynical act on the verge of criminal to needlessly stoke constituent fears of the unknown for perceived political gain. There’s no medically valid reason to doubt CDC Director Dr. Tom Friedan’s working theory that Nina Pham, the 26-year-old woman who was the first to contract the disease Stateside, did so because of a Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) “breach in protocol.”

There’s even less justification for leveraging the situation to foment xenophobia. I offer Washington Post writer Gail Sullivan’s piece, “For the right, Ebola is the latest rallying cry for closing the Mexican border,” by way of example. Sullivan observes “[First US-diagnosed patient Thomas Eric] Duncan arrived on a plane from Liberia. But that hasn’t stopped people from stoking fear that Ebola will spread to the United States via our border with Mexico, a country that has seen exactly zero cases of Ebola thus far. Few seem as concerned about Ebola entering the United States via Canada, our less politically-fraught border to the north.”

Less malevolent, but still shameful reporting practices have assisted in alienating thinking people. Earlier this week, Jon Stewart did a great send-up of mass media’s Ebola coverage. As the legendary Will & Grace character Karen Walker once observed of an anecdote, “It’s funny because it’s sad.” That is certainly true of the “sanity-resistant” faux analysis surrounding the isolated Texas cases. While there’s nothing humorous about the real suffering of real people, a variety of opportunists with an Ebola agenda make it hard to accommodate genuine concern with sneering disapproval. Rather than fight the good fight, it’s often easier to disengage. After all, there’s a new season of The Walking Dead on AMC.

To these layers of coverage perturbation, New York Timescolumnist Frank Bruni added another on Tuesday with his piece, “Scarier Than Ebola.” The writer opens with a succinct and withering indictment of our culture: “We Americans do panic really well. We could use a few pointers on prudence.”

Bruni continues, “During the 2013-2014 flu season…only 46 percent of Americans received vaccinations against influenza, even though it kills about 3,000 people in this country in a good year, nearly 50,000 in a bad one.

These are deaths by a familiar assassin. Many of them could have been prevented. So why aren’t we in a lather over that? Why fixate on remote threats that we feel we can’t control when there are immediate ones that we simply don’t bother to?”

It’s a feature of human nature that we are inclined to ruminate on the novel and titillating rather than the routine. It’s an impulse we come by honestly, but also one we should endeavor to check. To continue Bruni’s argument, there are thousands of risks Americans take almost unconsciously every day that pose a greater threat to body and spirit than Ebola, such as getting in a car, drinking milk after the sell-by date or listening to the Rush Limbaugh Show. And by indulging in the worst of our impulses, we not only ignore real risks, we enable truly terrible reporting and disingenuously motivated political speech.

But at the end of the day, Fox News and anti-immigration lawmakers are just giving us what we want. If there were no audience for this type of garbage, it would fade away. Let’s stop indulging it and regain a little perspective. Perhaps that will create space to aid and support eradication of Ebola where it truly exists at epidemic levels – Western Africa.

The Congressional Budget Office Vs. Paul Ryan: Will the Nonpartisan Entity Stand Its Ground? (October 7, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

paul ryan

This past weekend, while broadcasting from the snazzy new studio of NBC’s Sunday stalwart, Meet the Press, freshman host Chuck Todd uttered a provocative statement/question directed at Dan Pfeiffer, senior advisor to President Obama. The dialogue centered on the Ebola crisis and the CDC’s preparedness to handle additional American cases that may develop. Todd sought to probe Pfeiffer about the government’s assurance of readiness, with references to other Obama administration scandals and missteps:

“I think one of your challenges though is a trust deficit that has been created over the last 18 months…it is a fact about all the different sort of government gaps over the last 18 months. Edward Snowden stealing NSA files, the VA faking wait times, IRS losing emails, healthcare.gov doesn’t launch.

The president himself saying, ‘U.S. intelligence agencies underestimated ISIS.’ The DHS, the border failure with that surge over the summer, sort of failure, and of course, the secret service. Why should we trust that what you’re saying about the CDC is able to handle this? You understand why there’s more skepticism than normal.”

While the relative applicability and fairness of the interrogation can be debated, Todd’s point about a broad crisis confidence in our leadership’s honesty, competency and proactivity is well-taken. To Todd’s list I might add that an overtly political, conservatively activist SCOTUS has also led to “more skepticism than normal” when it comes to independent truth. There are very few nonpartisan, unbiased institutions left to us.

But we always have the Congressional Budget Office. Or do we? Per its website, the CBO describes its mission as follows:

“Since its founding in 1974, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process. The agency is strictly nonpartisan and conducts objective, impartial analysis, which is evident in each of the dozens of reports and hundreds of cost estimates that its economists and policy analysts produce each year. All CBO employees are appointed solely on the basis of professional competence, without regard to political affiliation. CBO does not make policy recommendations, and each report and cost estimate discloses the agency’s assumptions and methodologies.”

For 30 years, American citizens have been able to enjoy the uninterrupted luxury of taking CBO data at face value, without having to search for a hidden agenda. It’s been quaint and refreshing. However, if he has his way, Wisconsin Congressman House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will deprive voters of one of its last cynicism-free zones. In his column “Voodoo Economics, the Next Generation,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes:

“[Ryan] is dropping broad hints that after the election he and his colleagues will do what the Bushies never did, try to push the budget office into adopting ‘dynamic scoring,’ that is, assuming a big economic payoff from tax cuts.

So why is this happening now? It’s not because voodoo economics has become any more credible.”

Note the transition from former President Bill Clinton’s late 1990s surplus, to Dubya’s early aughts budget crater, should have been enough to teach us all that tax cuts do not, after all, pay for themselves. When money is returned to the already wealthy, they don’t invest in human capital and infrastructure projects. They buy things and hoard cash as the deficit balloons.

But nevertheless, as Krugman continues:

“Voodoo economics has dominated the conservative movement for so long that it has become an inward-looking cult, whose members know what they know and are impervious to contrary evidence…

[And] Second, the nature of the budget debate means that Republican leaders need to believe in the ways of magic.”

Well, the GOP establishment has the freedom to pursue any convoluted agenda it likes. They can continue to play Jedi Mind Tricks on the mass media and members of the party’s fervent base. But the CBO doesn’t have to play co-conspirator, and moreover, it musn’t.

One need not be an economist with a PhD to understand that large-scale tax cuts carry a cost ($3.5 trillion to extend all of the Bush cuts, except the estate and gift tax reductions, through 2020), not an economic return. Does the CBO have the pride and determination to weather the post-midterm election political pressure from the right? If not, I have to agree with Krugman that, “It would destroy the credibility of a very important institution, one that has served the country well.”

Last week we watched a once vaunted institution, the Secret Service, crumble under the weight of scandal and mismanagement. And it’s been years since the basic functions of Congress ground to a halt as the result of partisan obstruction. The CBO must protect its impartiality, not for the sake of any Republican or Democratic agenda, but for the people. Let’s do something really revolutionary. Let’s win one for common sense.

In Stunning Display Of Myopia, Ross Douthat Wonders Where The ‘Frightening Fringe Groups’ Are (October 2, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

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As a general rule, we’ve accepted that it’s best to ignore the right wing pundits and writers who overrun large swaths of our local and national media apparatuses. As most of us learned in childhood, once you give a loudmouth attention, it’s unlikely he or she will ever retreat. These talking heads are really just speaking to their own kind anyway, right?

Sometimes they’re whipping up the base over social issues fashioned into a wedge-shaped instrument with which to blunt public discourse (see: gay marriage 2004 or abortion 2012). Other times they are inflating a non-scandal (such as the supposed Benghazi conspiracy) to create a political distraction. And when not occupied with the previous two scenarios, these “journalists” are usually looking to provide disingenuous cover for the GOP’s indefensible positions on a whole host of issues such as: the rejection of Medicare expansion, the out of control proliferation of guns and ammunition, a head-in-the sand approach to immigration reform, and tax policy that enriches the one percent at the expense of everything else (the middle and working classes, public education, infrastructure, etc.).

But sometimes, it’s hard to let a tone deaf piece of right wing commentary slide, particularly when it appears in the “newspaper of record,” The New York Times. And doubly so when it is symptomatic of the GOP’s greatest ill: a shocking and dangerous lack of self-awareness.

At the end of a recent Sunday Review Op-Ed entitled, “The Cult Deficit,” I found myself annoyed by some of Douthat’s bland, unquantifiable assertions about the state of religious pedagogy. Take this example: “Spiritual gurus still flourish in our era, of course, but they are generally comforting, vapid, safe.” I’m not sure the majority of Americans found recently deceased Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps comforting or safe. Vapid possibly, but Phelps’ form of hate-filled ignorance was certainly not benign. However, we’ve come to accept this kind of selective memory from conservative commentators.

What really took me by surprise was the crux of Douthat’s argument, the base upon which the entire ludicrous column was constructed:

“From the 1970s through the 1990s, from Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, frightening fringe groups and their charismatic leaders seemed like an essential element of the American religious landscape.

Yet we don’t hear nearly as much about them anymore.”

To this, I would offer three counter observations/ questions:

  1. Frightening fringe groups with religious underpinnings have progressed beyond the edge, working their way to the mainstream with shocking alacrity.
  2. Do you really not know who these people are, Douthat?
  3. To quote the character Ted from How I Met Your Mother, “If you can’t spot the crazy person on the bus, it’s you.”

Mr. Douthat, the radical fringe is, in fact, alive and well and to drop another pop cultural reference, their calls are coming from inside the House. The GOP-led, gerrymandered, ideological purity tested, Tea-Party infested House of Representatives. Your argument that “many fewer Americans ‘take unorthodox ideas seriously,’” is undone in seconds, without much effort.

  • Only 25 percent of Tea Partiers acknowledge the reality of climate change.
  • We’ve made it a mere 83 days without a male GOP candidate using the word “rape,” typically alongside a swipe at a woman’s right to choose.
  • Despite years and years of evidence to the contrary, Republican orthodoxy insists we can leverage austerity to starve our way out of recession.

It must be noted that across most of the Western world, suggestions that global warming is a hoax, that reducing access to family planning options is positive for “women’s health” or that widespread gun ownership saves lives, would be laughed out of the room. But here in good old America, these arguments are accepted as educated disagreement. And nothing is more radical and “crazy” than that. What need have we for cults when Washington is overrun with fringe lunatics with dangerous ideas, damaging the country and the direction of its policy each and every day?

Apparently when Douthat looks at a reflection of his party in the mirror, he sees normalcy. That’s how deluded the GOP perspective has become. Worse yet, the rest of us have become enablers. I opened the column with an observation that “it’s best to ignore the right wing pundits and writers who overrun large swaths of our local and national media apparatuses.” But no, that is incorrect. We are on the fringe because we allowed the conversation to be moved there.

It’s tempting to extrapolate from Douthat’s statement, “the cult phenomenon feels increasingly antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms,” that the current radical right fever will eventually cure itself. But if there’s nothing forcing the fever to break – decreased media traction, lost votes and other forms of public rebuke – it will continue to burn.

So this column is my minor contribution to the effort. Can’t find the cult Mr. Douthat? It’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time.